Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
this small community was near to the garrison town of Thonburi and to numerous other
scattered settlements, and conveniently on the route to Ayutthaya.
The Church of Immaculate Conception, founded by Portuguese missionaries.
The French precipitating the siege of Bangkok in 1688 was an enormous setback for
the Catholic missionaries and for Europeans in general. They were no longer welcome in
Siam, except for the Portuguese, who were so well assimilated that they were regarded al-
most as Siamese. The era of King Taksin still saw a rocky relationship with the Christians,
again except for the Portuguese, and so the small Immaculate Conception parish on the
riverbank continued, and was known as the Portuguese Village, Ban Portugal. In 1785, just
three years after Bangkok had been founded, there was a persecution of the small commu-
nity of Christians in Cambodia, and a number of them fled to Siam, where Rama
I
granted
them sanctuary and directed that, as Christians, they should settle in the Christian district
of Ban Portugal. Catholic records state that in 1785 there were 379 Cambodian Cathol-
ics at the Church of Immaculate Conception, a sizeable community, large enough for the
village to become known as Ban Khmer, the name by which it is still known today. Even-
tually the tiny chapel was inadequate for the congregation, and Monsignor Jean-Baptiste
Pallegoix built a second church in 1832, rebuilding it as the present structure in 1847. The
original chapel is known as Bot Noi, or Small Chapel, and it has been used as a storeroom
and as a museum, although following a recent restoration it is unclear what the next phase
is going to be. The people of Ban Khmer are a mix of Portuguese, Khmer and Thai blood,
and their heritage can be traced in certain types of food they eat and words they use that
have migrated into their dialect.
Retracing our steps past the cemetery brings us to the rear of another Christian
church, this one far larger. This is Ban Yuen, the Village of the Vietnamese, and St Francis
Xavier Church. There have been several Vietnamese settlements named Ban Yuen, but
this is the largest and most enduring of them all. During the time of Rama
I
there had been
a significant migration of Vietnamese to Siam, both Christian and Buddhist, and while the
Buddhists settled in the Pahurat district, on the fringe of Chinatown, the Christians had
